Detriot
 

No one talking about the fact they filed for chapter 9 bankruptcy :huh:
They have been spending 100 million more than they take in since 2008.
Probably no big deal since our government is running the country the same way on a much larger scale :uhuh:

Detroit has been on a downhill slide since before you were filling diapers. :hihi:

Central falls in RI did this 2 years ago I think. It's a sign of the times due to globalization.
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Wrong.
It's been close to 50 years since I 1st was in diapers.




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So every country on the globe is spending more than they take in and increasing the public hand out system ?





QUOTE=Nebe;1006950]Central falls in RI did this 2 years ago I think. It's a sign of the times due to globalization.
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I remember the first time I went to Detroit probably mid 1990s. Couldn't believe all the bombed out buildings. Manufacturing left followed by the people.

Glad you're enjoying it though.
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i think it is a shame and feel sorry for the current & former people from Detroit.

Years of bad management, industry, me me me constituencies, graft, and politicians (could group them as one) have brought on this sorrow - in more places than just Detroit.

And its been on a downhill slide for 60 years.

Bull#^&#^&#^&#^& it has. !
The auto industry alone through the 70s & into the 80s was booming there, so much so the big 3 gave away the farm to the unions which is one of the biggest reasons they are hurting now.
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Thank the UAW for NAFTA.
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One thing is for sure.
I don't share your warped sense of pitty for the lazy, stupid or the corrupt !!!






QUOTE=spence;1006959]I remember the first time I went to Detroit probably mid 1990s. Couldn't believe all the bombed out buildings. Manufacturing left followed by the people.

Glad you're enjoying it though.
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Yes, we can look at the many pieces that make a great city and point out how this that and the other caused the downfall. But we can also look at the whole. In totality, the city is the people. The people determine the greatness or poorness of the city. It is the people who must ultimately decide who will manage and in what way, whether industry and the entire market will be free to operate in a profitable and competitive way or be strapped with constrictive regulations, burdensome taxes, and crony partnerships with politicians that drive out competitors and entrap the citizens in one-dimensional and shrinking choices. It is the people who must build safe communities with common values rather than divisive tactics which drive out the productive who don't fit majority cultural norms. And it is the people who must ultimately take the blame for the destruction of one of the greatest cities in the world.

But when the people are persuaded to follow an agenda that promises to free them of the responsibility to be great, or even adequate, then all is turned upside down. They then choose to follow a path which not only strips them of responsibility, but herds them into a dependency which cannot sustain itself.

And when the people of a country does the same, it will suffer the same fate.

Amen !







QUOTE=detbuch;1006973]Yes, we can look at the many pieces that make a great city and point out how this that and the other caused the downfall. But we can also look at the whole. In totality, the city is the people. The people determine the greatness or poorness of the city. It is the people who must ultimately decide who will manage and in what way, whether industry and the entire market will be free to operate in a profitable and competitive way or be strapped with constrictive regulations, burdensome taxes, and crony partnerships with politicians that drive out competitors and entrap the citizens in one-dimensional and shrinking choices. It is the people who must build safe communities with common values rather than divisive tactics which drive out the productive who don't fit majority cultural norms. And it is the people who must ultimately take the blame for the destruction of one of the greatest cities in the world.

But when the people are persuaded to follow an agenda that promises to free them of the responsibility to be great, or even adequate, then all is turned upside down. They then choose to follow a path which not only strips them of responsibility, but herds them into a dependency which cannot sustain itself.

And when the people of a country does the same, it will suffer the same fate.[/QUOTE]
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Population in Detroit is half it was in 1950 by I believe public employees are 40% more then 1950. Shows what happens when you just keep kicking the can down the road. Lesson learned.... Doubt it
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The auto industry itself was booming, the city of Detroit was a craphole then.

GM Factory #1 was never in Detroit for example.
It was in Flint Michigan. An hour NW of Detroit.

Also Buicks first plant was in Flint.

Practically nothing was in Detroit except offices, giant pretty logos and suits.

Kind of explains why the show "Hardcore Pawn" is never short of "characters" when they all seem to be one welfare check away from ultimate rock bottom.

What could be done to rejuvenate this city?
Exactly how much of a bailout should they be asking for?
How much of the bailout funds will end up in people's pockets (not the citizens, but the political leeches)?
Is it worth saving, or should we just let it fade into oblivion?

I would say save it if the people are willing to work to bring it back, and willing to cut out ALL wasteful spending (that means starting from the top and cutting off EVERYONE that doesn't deserve a paycheck (or a kickback as it may apply)!

Of course we could do the same starting here in our own backyards too!!!

debt riot

It's what happens when classes are divided based on wealth . The poor are left to struggle along in government handouts and the higher income people who create jobs move out. Unsustainable Lesson learned? Doubt it
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ps: Chrysler = Pontiac, Michigan not Detroit

Just sayin. :hihi:

During the 70's the cars were crap and in the 80's the Japanese were kicking our butts in automotive manufacturing......wasn't GM on the verge of bankruptcy in the early 80's?
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If the city totally craps out, they could always advertise as a "sanctuary city" for (illegal) immigrants, (accused) terrorists and (criminal) political exiles?

All through the 1970s & 80 yes yes American cars were becoming more & more of pieces of crap, I know as I grew up in a repair garage starting in the late 1960s and have been fixing them for about 40 years, but they were still selling in big numbers.
I know my grandfather's & father's generations would never own a foreign (more specific a Jap) car from living & serving through ww2.
Also, the 1970s, foreign (more specific Jap) cars were junk.
All through the 1980s our shop was filled with American cars with the occasional foreign car.
Through the 1990s a bit less American ( although Ford has always stayed strong) & more foreign, and more & more the foreign cars are much eaisier to work on, more specific Jap cars.
Now 2013, I couldn't tell you the last time I fixed a GM or Chrysler/Dodge and we still fix our share of Fords.
GM & Chrysler are DONE in this country and have no one but themselves (and their UAW) to blame !
Kia & Hyundai kick their ass in sales & quality !!!

I miss the K car

best line of the year....

“If Obama had a city, it would look like Detroit.”


wait...I thought he saved Detroit???....ohhh, now..."Detriot" means the car industry which isn't really "Detroit"....cept' a few offices?

love this guy...

July 19, 2013 6:15 PM

The Downfall of Detroit
It took only six decades of “progressive” policies to bring a great city to its knees.
By Mark Steyn


By the time Detroit declared bankruptcy, Americans were so inured to the throbbing dirge of Motown’s Greatest Hits — 40 percent of its streetlamps don’t work; 210 of its 317 public parks have been permanently closed; it takes an hour for police to respond to a 9-1-1 call; only a third of its ambulances are driveable; one-third of the city has been abandoned; the local realtor offers houses on sale for a buck and still finds no takers; etc., etc. — Americans were so inured that the formal confirmation of a great city’s downfall was greeted with little more than a fatalistic shrug.

But it shouldn’t be. To achieve this level of devastation, you usually have to be invaded by a foreign power. In the War of 1812, when Detroit was taken by a remarkably small number of British troops without a shot being fired, Michigan’s Governor Hull was said to have been panicked into surrender after drinking heavily. Two centuries later, after an almighty 50-year bender, the city surrendered to itself. The tunnel from Windsor, Ontario, to Detroit, Michigan, is now a border between the First World and the Third World — or, if you prefer, the developed world and the post-developed world. To any American time-transported from the mid 20th century, the city’s implosion would be literally incredible: Were he to compare photographs of today’s Hiroshima with today’s Detroit, he would assume Japan won the Second World War after nuking Michigan. Detroit was the industrial powerhouse of America, the “arsenal of democracy,” and in 1960 the city with the highest per capita income in the land. Half a century on, Detroit’s population has fallen by two-thirds, and in terms of “per capita income,” many of the shrunken pool of capita have no income at all beyond EBT cards. The recent HBO series Hung recorded the adventures of a financially struggling Detroit school basketball coach forced to moonlight as a gigolo. It would be heartening to think the rest of the bloated public-sector work force, whose unsustainable pensions and benefits have brought Detroit to its present sorry state (and account for $9 billion of its $11 billion in unsecured loans), could be persuaded to follow its protagonist and branch out into the private sector, but this would probably be more gigolos than the market could bear, even allowing for an uptick in tourism from Windsor.

So, late on Friday, some genius jurist struck down the bankruptcy filing. Judge Rosemarie Aquilina declared Detroit’s bankruptcy “unconstitutional” because, according to the Detroit Free Press, “the Michigan Constitution prohibits actions that will lessen the pension benefits of public employees.” Which means that, in Michigan, reality is unconstitutional.

So a bankrupt ruin unable to declare bankruptcy is now back to selling off its few remaining valuables, as I learned from a Detroit News story headlined “Howdy Doody May Test Limits of Protecting Detroit Assets.” For those of you under 40 — okay, under 80 — Howdy Doody is the beloved American children’s puppet, in western garb with a beaming smile and 48 freckles, one for every state, which gives you some idea of when his heyday was. The Howdy Doody Show ended its run on September 24, 1960, which would have made sense for Detroit, too. The city’s Institute of Arts paid $300,000 for the original Howdy Doody puppet — or about the cost of 300,000 three-bedroom homes. Don’t get too excited — you can’t go to Detroit and see him on display; he’s in storage. He’s in some warehouse lying down doing nothing all day long, like so many other $300,000 city employees. Instead of selling him off, maybe they should get him moonlighting as a gigolo and sell it to HBO as Hungy Doody (“When you’re looking for the real wood”). What else is left to sell? The City of Windsor has already offered to buy the Detroit half of the Detroit/Windsor tunnel, perhaps to wall it up.

With bankruptcy temporarily struck down, we’re told that “innovation hubs” and “enterprise zones” are the answer. Seriously? In my book After America, I observe that the physical decay of Detroit — the vacant and derelict lots for block after block after block — is as nothing compared to the decay of the city’s human capital. Forty-seven percent of adults are functionally illiterate, which is about the same rate as the Central African Republic, which at least has the excuse that it was ruled throughout the Seventies by a cannibal emperor. Why would any genuine innovator open a business in a Detroit “innovation hub”? Whom would you employ? The illiterates include a recent president of the school board, Otis Mathis, which doesn’t bode well for the potential work force a decade hence.

Given their respective starting points, one has to conclude that Detroit’s Democratic party makes a far more comprehensive wrecking crew than Emperor Bokassa ever did. No bombs, no invasions, no civil war, just “liberal” “progressive” politics day in, day out. Americans sigh and say, “Oh, well, Detroit’s an ‘outlier.’” It’s an outlier only in the sense that it happened here first. The same malign alliance between a corrupt political class, rapacious public-sector unions, and an ever more swollen army of welfare dependents has been adopted in the formally Golden State of California, and in large part by the Obama administration, whose priorities — “health” “care” “reform,” “immigration” “reform” — are determined by the same elite/union/dependency axis. As one droll tweeter put it, “If Obama had a city, it would look like Detroit.”

After the Battle of Saratoga, Adam Smith famously told a friend despondent that the revolting colonials were going to be the ruin of Britain, “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation” — and in a great city, too. If your inheritance includes the fruits of visionaries like Henry Ford, Walter Chrysler, and the Dodge brothers, you can coast for a long time, and then decline incrementally, and then less incrementally, and then catastrophically, until what’s left is, as the city’s bankruptcy petition puts it, “structurally unsound and in danger of collapse.” There is a great deal of ruin in advanced societies, but even in Detroit it took only six decades.

“Structurally unsound and in danger of collapse”: Hold that thought. Like Detroit, America has unfunded liabilities, to the tune of $220 trillion, according to the economist Laurence Kotlikoff. Like Detroit, it’s cosseting the government class and expanding the dependency class, to the point where its bipartisan “immigration reform” actively recruits 50–60 million low-skilled chain migrants. Like Detroit, America’s governing institutions are increasingly the corrupt enforcers of a one-party state — the IRS and Eric Holder’s amusingly misnamed Department of Justice being only the most obvious examples. Like Detroit, America is bifurcating into the class of “community organizers” and the unfortunate denizens of the communities so organized.

The one good thing that could come out of bankruptcy is if those public-sector pensions are cut and government workers forced to learn what happens when, as National Review’s Kevin Williamson puts it, a parasite outgrows its host. But, pending an appeal, that’s “unconstitutional,” no matter how dead the host is. Beyond that, Detroit needs urgently both to make it non-insane for talented people to live in the city, and to cease subjecting its present population to a public “education” system that’s little more than unionized child abuse. Otherwise, Windsor, Ontario, might as well annex it for a War of 1812 theme park — except if General Brock and the Royal Newfoundland Fencibles had done to Detroit what the Democratic party did they’d be on trial for war crimes at The Hague.

you're a sick sick man.

one day i will leave a gremlin in your driveway as a present. :hihi:

The pacer was a neat car.
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AMC also made the javelin, nice!
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Chrysler also made the 440 c.i. Wedge engine
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Bet the blocks would make a great small boat mooring. :hihi:

as Pogo once said, "I have met the enemy, and he is US".. or some such similar thing...

Detroit fell to it's own multiple self inflicted bullets..

however.. there are some enterprising souls there, that have adapted and done well.. and with Mother Nature relcaiming the abaondoned areas.. the Raccoon hunting, is stellar!.. "Look for the Paw"

http://www.detroitnews.com/article/2...+scampering+by

Yes Karl, nature abhors a vacuum and will take over an area within 5 years.
No problem getting caught hunting there, what's another gun shot.
Sad state of affairs. :( A lot of blame to go around.

http://www.policymic.com/mobile/arti...eaking-awesome
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We're not enjoying it Spence. We're wondering if there are lessons to be learned, and the answer (unless you are blinded by ideology) is 'yes'. The lesson is that, while a municipality isn't the same thing as a family or a business, there are still limits to how much you can borrow or spend. Detroit isn't the first city to file for bankruptcy, and they sure won't be the last. For the next 15 years, 10,000 Baby Boomers a day turn 65. 10,000 a day. They have been promised, and are expecting, perks that can never be paid for. That problem is largely due to the fact that your side has whored themselves out to labor unions. Try making that wrong.

The same blueprint used by Stockton and our current administration too.
It is just a matter of time where that blueprint and our national debt
will take our country to it's demise.

Scott, that was hilarious. Love Marc Steyn...

"if Obama had a city, it would look like Detroit" - that is gold, pure gold.

Exactly my reason for starting this tread.
Our elected officials are leading us there and could give a #^&#^&#^&#^& what happens.
They have made the rules and all have made themselves rich in the process and will be fine when the #^&#^&#^&#^& hits the fan !

and those that elect them apparently...interesting to note the reactions of the usual suspects who fancy themselves far more compassionate, better educated...more capable of looking at issues in a balanced way without bias and deft at making intelligent judgments(unlike the rest of us).....bad jokes, denial, sarcasm....67 shootings and 11 murders in Chicago -IN ONE WEEKEND - "pffft...Chicago will never be Baltimore"....

when faced with the obvious fact that the policies they espouse have failed miserably in maintaining the government that they seek to grow perpetually and administer in their high minded way or in helping the people whose lives they were supposed to improve and at least maintain with a safety net but are now left in little more than ruin, squalor and human suffering...they suddenly lose their "compassion" and become quite snarky:uhuh:

they will never look at Detroit or the next city to fail and recognize the failure of their policies but rather simply a shortfall in funding of their brilliant policies which can't possibly be wrongheaded being built on compassion and superior intellect

it's quite insane :uhuh:

Charley Reese's final column for the Orlando Sentinel... He has been a journalist for 49 years. He is retiring and this is HIS LAST COLUMN.

Be sure to read the Tax List at the end.

This is about as clear and easy to understand as it can be. The article below is completely neutral, neither anti-republican or democrat. Charlie Reese, a retired reporter for the Orlando Sentinel, has hit the nail directly on the head, defining clearly who it is that in the final analysis must assume responsibility for the judgments made that impact each one of us every day. It's a short but good read. Worth the time. Worth remembering!

545 vs. 300,000,000 People
-By Charlie Reese

Politicians are the only people in the world who create problems and then campaign against them.

Have you ever wondered, if both the Democrats and the Republicans are against deficits, WHY do we have deficits?

Have you ever wondered, if all the politicians are against inflation and high taxes, WHY do we have inflation and high taxes?

You and I don't propose a federal budget. The President does.

You and I don't have the Constitutional authority to vote on appropriations. The House of Representatives does.

You and I don't write the tax code, Congress does.

You and I don't set fiscal policy, Congress does.

You and I don't control monetary policy, the Federal Reserve Bank does.

One hundred senators, 435 congressmen, one President, and nine Supreme Court justices equates to 545 human beings out of the 300 million are directly, legally, morally, and individually responsible for the domestic problems that plague this country.

I excluded the members of the Federal Reserve Board because that problem was created by the Congress. In 1913, Congress delegated its Constitutional duty to provide a sound currency to a federally chartered, but private, central bank.

I excluded all the special interests and lobbyists for a sound reason. They have no legal authority. They have no ability to coerce a senator, a congressman, or a President to do one cotton-picking thing. I don't care if they offer a politician $1 million dollars in cash. The politician has the power to accept or reject it. No matter what the lobbyist promises, it is the legislator's responsibility to determine how he votes.

Those 545 human beings spend much of their energy convincing you that what they did is not their fault. They cooperate in this common con regardless of party.

What separates a politician from a normal human being is an excessive amount of gall. No normal human being would have the gall of a Speaker, who stood up and criticized the President for creating deficits.. ( The President can only propose a budget. He cannot force the Congress to accept it.)

The Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land, gives sole responsibility to the House of Representatives for originating and approving appropriations and taxes. Who is the speaker of the House?( John Boehner. He is the leader of the majority party. He and fellow House members, not the President, can approve any budget they want. ) If the President vetoes it, they can pass it over his veto if they agree to. [The House has passed a budget but the Senate has not approved a budget in over three years. The President's proposed budgets have gotten almost unanimous rejections in the Senate in that time. ]

It seems inconceivable to me that a nation of 300 million cannot replace 545 people who stand convicted -- by present facts -- of incompetence and irresponsibility. I can't think of a single domestic problem that is not traceable directly to those 545 people. When you fully grasp the plain truth that 545 people exercise the power of the federal government, then it must follow that what exists is what they want to exist.

If the tax code is unfair, it's because they want it unfair.

If the budget is in the red, it's because they want it in the red.

If the Army & Marines are in Iraq and Afghanistan it's because they want them in Iraq and Afghanistan ..

If they do not receive social security but are on an elite retirement plan not available to the people, it's because they want it that way.

There are no insoluble government problems.

Do not let these 545 people shift the blame to bureaucrats, whom they hire and whose jobs they can abolish; to lobbyists, whose gifts and advice they can reject; to regulators, to whom they give the power to regulate and from whom they can take this power.
Above all, do not let them con you into the belief that there exists disembodied mystical forces like "the economy," "inflation," or "politics" that prevent them from doing what they take an oath to do.

Those 545 people, and they alone, are responsible. They, and they alone, have the power.

They, and they alone, should be held accountable by the people who are their bosses. Provided the voters have the gumption to manage their own employees... We should vote all of them out of office and clean up their mess!

Charlie Reese is a former columnist of the Orlando Sentinel Newspaper.
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Mostly true;

from a written when / who standpoint - Reese wrote it before Iraq / AFG http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/reese.asp

Name me a better government system? WE need to do better selecting & electing these buttholes - then we may have a chance. But we need at least 2 real parties as either one with full control would be disatorus.

Two party politics - its a feature, not a bug. Look @ RI the one party state :smash: